Grapes, Beans, and Salt

Now that it's late summer, we're harvesting beans and grapes. The grapes were really beautiful and prolific this year. The red ones that is; the Thompsons were weak as usual.

The arbor was totally loaded.

So we picked them....

De-stemmed them and ran them through the food mill...

And made jelly. I wish I'd gotten a shot of how many bins of grapes we had! But it was about 15 gallons of grapes, which became about 10 gallons once stemmed, and made more than 5 gallons of juice! Yikes! I made 96 half pint jars of jelly. That's 8 cases of 12. What's showing here is less than half. Yes, that's nuts. Half are low sugar and the other half are regular. The low sugar really lets the grape flavor come through, but the regular will suit many people's palates.

We also have been harvesting and shelling beans. Rick and Catherine work on some Red Mexicans, which were the last to ripen this time (or at least the last to be picked).

We got a good harvest of Cannelini and Jacob's Cattle, plus the Flambo and Black Turtle (not shown). I weighed all the beans and split them into 5 shares. We got: White: 32 oz total, 6.4 oz per share; Jacob's Cattle: 21.8 oz total, 4.3 oz per share; Flambo: 30 oz total, 6 oz per share, and Black Turtle, 57.5 oz total, 11.5 per share. We're still shelling out the Red Mexicans. White and Jacob's only had a half row each while the rest had full rows. I also harvested a lot of Flambo at home.

The third major production piece for late summer is more seasoned salt. I finally broke down and bought a real food processor, so this is the last time I have to make a zillion tiny bits. But I tried some new techniques this time, including adding black sesame seeds and using some of the new basils.

Notice the harp in the corner. I had this huge urge to play harp, so I bought a little one to practice on. To help myself learn, I pulled out the melodica. Now I've mostly been playing the melodica, which is much easier! It's a beautiful instrument though, and I will learn to play it. It's a bit limited with only 12 strings and no way to make sharps or flats on the fly.

We got the cabinet doors sealed and brought to the farm. Now we just need to put them up.

Jesse and Jana from Triple J farms came by last Friday to visit. I didn't get a shot of them, but they brought us this lovely Blue Hubbard squash.

The tomatoes slowed down for a while, but we are seeing lots of new blossoms so we might get another wave. I'm also still harvesting peppers, and I've been very happy with a probiotic hot sauce I made using salt and whey.